The Baltic state-sponsored political infiltration into supposedly independent academic bodies concerned with Holocaust studies and education came into sharp focus in Washington this week with leakage to the media of a number of letters from Artūras Vazbys, Minister Counselor at the Lithuanian embassy in Washington DC. The identical letters read:
Politics of Memory
Lithuania’s Embassy in Washington Recruiting “Useful Academics” for Discredited “Red-Brown” Commission
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, News & Views, Politics of Memory, United States, US State Dept Manipulated?
Tagged Emanuelis Zingeris, Holocaust in Lithuania, International Commission for the Evlauation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, Ronaldas Racinskas
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Some Psycho-Sexual Undercurrents of the Lithuanian Independence Day Nazi March
O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
Back in 2008 a friend and I put subtitles to the march by Lithuanian neo-Nazis through the capital, Vilnius, on independence day, and put the video with subtitles up on YouTube. Back then there was almost zero mention of the march where openly fascist youth chanted slogans about attacking and killing Jews and Russians, and the de rigueur “Juden raus.” Following the YouTube posting and as news travelled around the world, certain Lithuanian media figures and politicians felt the need to at least say something. Not much, but something.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Events, Geoff Vasil, Humor (Of Sorts), LGBTQ Equal Rights, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius, Vilnius Jewish Public Library
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Will Intellectuals in Western Countries Continue their Silence on Latvia’s Glorification of Hitler’s Waffen SS?
E Y E W I T N E S S R E P O R T / O P I N I O N
by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)
RIGA—The day is a festive one despite the gray and low sky. Young pretty girls have bunches of roses which they soon distribute to elderly and solemn gentlemen arriving, row upon row in an interminable procession. Numerous national flags are held in a heraldic and staid way by young men forming a kind of double guard of honor.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Collaborators Glorified, Events, Human Rights, Latvia, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Riga's Waffen SS Marches, Roland Binet
Tagged Holocaust in Latvia, Holocaust in the Baltics
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1500 Honor the Waffen SS at Riga’s Liberty Monument; Event is Praised by Latvia’s President, Condemned by Council of Europe’s Commission on Racism
E Y E W I T N E S S R E P O R T / O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
RIGA—According to most estimates, there were around 1500 participants today in the city-center ceremony honoring the Waffen SS, about 1000 police, and about one hundred protesters who turned out in opposition to the event.
The ongoing campaign by some East European governments to repackage far-right ultranationalist politics and policies (with concomitant antisemitic, racist and Nazi-glorifying undertones) as a wholesome British-conservative-style “center right” has suffered a major blow. The battleground of ideas has in recent weeks shifted to the annual Waffen SS commemoration ceremony held at Liberty Monument, the symbolic heart of the capital of Latvia, with the blessing of some of the nation’s top leaders.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Collaborators Glorified, Dovid Katz, Events, Human Rights, Latvia, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Racism, Riga's Waffen SS Marches, Symbology
Tagged Holocaust in Latvia, Holocaust in the Baltics
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Saying No to “Double Genocide”
O P I N I O N
by Danny-Ben Moshe
This comment appeared today in the Jerusalem Post and is republished here with the author’s permission.
The Israel-South Africa Chamber of Commerce is hosting as guest of honor Lithuanian Foreign Minister Audronius Ažubalis at a gala dinner. Given the current Lithuanian government’s policies towards the Holocaust, it is a bizarre choice.
More than twenty years into their post-Soviet eras, Lithuania and other East European nations are understandably and appropriately seeking international acknowledgment for the suffering inflicted on them by the Soviet regime.
However, rather than commemorating this in its own right, Lithuania has led the campaign to tie this recognition in with the Holocaust, in a policy known as Double Genocide. By so doing, the recognition they seek for their own suffering under the Soviets ipso facto becomes a policy that distorts and downgrades the Holocaust, and undermines and threatens its memory.
Posted in 70 Years Declaration, Danny Ben-Moshe, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, South Africa
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Once Again, Moral Abdication at the American Embassy in Vilnius?
C O M M E N T
In contrast to its potent and convincing public response to neo-Nazi events in the center of Vilnius in earlier years, the current leadership of the American embassy in the Lithuanian capital has followed a pattern disturbing to many Americans, of failing to even mention what America’s values are in commenting in official communications on both a neo-Nazi march and a pro-tolerance march, both scheduled for tomorrow, Lithuania’s independence day.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, The OSCE, United States, US State Dept Manipulated?
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Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors Protest Tel Aviv “Gala”
Kovno Ghetto Survivor and Resistance Hero Joe Melamed, 87, Leads March 5th 2012 Picket Line Against “Sellout Gala” at the Tel Aviv Dan Panorama
Lithuanian Foreign Minister and Brothers Zingeris are Greeted by Protesting Holocaust Survivors
A FIRST-TIME PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN LEYVIK HOUSE YIDDISH CULTURE CENTER, THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER ISRAEL OFFICE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF LITHUANIAN JEWS IN ISRAEL
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Efraim Zuroff, Israel, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, South Africa
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Images from a Survivor Demonstration at the Dan Panorama in Tel Aviv
Most counts put at eighteen the number of participants in a small, polite but determined picket line outside the Dan Panorama Hotel in Tel Aviv this evening. The protesters, Holocaust survivors from Lithuania and their supporters, sported signs in English, Hebrew and Yiddish taking to task the government-manipulated gala evening being held inside the hotel by “Yisrael Lita” at which the Lithuanian foreign minister, a determined opponent of accurate Holocaust comemmoration, was “guest of honor.”
Posted in Events, Israel, Joseph Melamed, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory
Tagged Audronius Azubalis, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust survivors protest Lithuanian government, Joseph Melamed, Lithuanian-Jewish affairs
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Monica Lowenberg in Dialogue with Latvia’s Ambassador to the UK
D E B A T E
From the 2009 Waffen SS march in Riga. Photo Ilmars Znotins.
Monica Lowenberg is the creator of the international petition against this year’s Waffen SS march scheduled for 16 March 2012 in the heart of Riga, Latvia’s capital city. The petition has to date attracted some six thousand signatures from every part of the planet.
Its author approached the Latvian ambassador to the UK for support.
Below is his letter of 1 March (as PDF here). It is followed by the text of Monica Lowenberg’s 5 March reply, supplied to DefendingHistory.com for publication.
I: The Latvian Ambassador to Monica Lowenberg (1 March 2012)
Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, Collaborators Glorified, Events, Free Speech & Democracy, History, Latvia, Monica Lowenberg, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Riga's Waffen SS Marches, United Kingdom
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The Posthumous Remaking of a Holocaust Perpetrator in Lithuania: Why is Jonas Noreika a National Hero?
O P I N I O N
by Evaldas Balčiūnas
Who was Jonas Noreika?
Jonas Noreika (1910-1947), also known by his nom de guerre, General Vėtra, has been named by the current Lithuanian government as “an important member of the resistance” and an object of every sort of heroic commemoration.
In 1997 he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Cross of Vytis, First Degree. The same year a memorial plaque was placed on the facade of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences Library in Vilnius.
Library of the Academy of Sciences in Vilnius. The red arrow marks the Noreika plaque.
Noreika plaque in central Vilnius
Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Debates on the Postwar "Forest Brothers", Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Exotic Jewish Tourism, History, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Plungyán (Plungė), Politics of Memory, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika, Symbology, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, General Vetka, Generolo Vetro gatve, Genocide Center, Glorification of War Criminals in Eastern Europe, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Obfuscation, Jonas Noreika, LIETUVOS MOKSLU AKAKEMIJOS VRUBLEVSKIU BIBLIOTEKA, Lithuanian Academy of Sciences Library, streets named for Holocaust perpetrators, Vilnius
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Lithuanian Radio Panel Discussion on the Seventy Years Declaration
The Seventy Years Declaration, released on 20 January 2012, was the subject of a 31 January 2012 Žinių radijas (News Radio) station panel discussion including one of the Lithuanian signatories of the declaration, Social Democratic MP Vytenis Andriukaitis, himself a signatory of the Lithuanian Declaration of Independence. MP Andriukaitis was attacked by the foreign minister for signing.
MP Andriukaitis’s response won international support, and there is reference in the panel discussion to the support from British human rights champion MP Denis MacShane for all eight Lithuanian parliamentarians who signed the Seventy Years Declaration.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", 70 Years Declaration, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Denis MacShane, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vytenis Andriukaitis
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Stop the Neo-Nazi Movement in Hungary!
O P I N I O N
by David Surjányi
Dozens of people marching on the streets with flags in their hands and badges on their chest.
When they reach their destination a strange looking person steps on the podium and starts to speak. His speech is saturated with hate. He demands a “Jew-free” country. He blames the Roma people for the problems of our society.
And this is not 1944. It is 2012. Here in Hungary.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Collaborators Glorified, Human Rights, Hungary, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Racism
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Council of Europe’s Commission Against Racism and Intolerance Condemns Latvia’s Waffen SS Parades and Celebration of Hitler’s 1941 Invasion
The Council of Europe’s Commission against Racism and Intolerance today published online its 9 December report ECRI Report on Latvia (fourth monitoring cycle). In the 67 page report, the ECRI (European Commission against Racism and Intolerance) explicitly condemns the Waffen SS marches enabled and supported for many years by some of the highest echelons of Latvian government and society. There is also reference to the more recent case of celebrating the day of Hitler’s invasion in 1941.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Human Rights, Latvia, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Racism, Riga's Waffen SS Marches, United Nations
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300 Neo-Nazis March through the Center of Kaunas on Lithuanian Independence Day; They are Addressed by Members of Parliament
E Y E W I T N E S S R E P O R T / O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
With attention focused on the government-permission-granted central Vilnius neo-Nazi march slated for Lithuania’s March 11th independence day — now the subject of an international petition on Change.org — there was minimal foreign interest in today’s independence day neo-Nazi march and demonstration in central Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city. The March 11th independence day marks the date in 1990 when Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union. Today’s holiday is on the date of the 1918 declaration of independence which heralded the rise of the modern Lithuanian state in the twentieth century. Both dates are revered by the country’s diverse minorities and factions. They represent freedom from oppression and foreign domination, and celebrate the building of a free and democratic state.
But in recent years, both dates have been hijacked by neo-Nazi groups in the heart of the country’s major cities, with the support of some members of parliament and leading political figures. There is, moreover, the proverbial blind eye of much or most of the elite classes, which serves as a contributing catalyst.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Dovid Katz, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Kaunas, LGBTQ Equal Rights, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, US State Dept Manipulated?
Tagged Emanuelis Zingeris, Kazimieras Uoka, neo-Nazi march in Kaunas, Petras Grazuils, Rima Baskiene, swastikas in Lithuania, Visa Marija Cigrijene, Vytautas Landsbergis
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Holocaust Survivors to Demonstrate outside Tel Aviv ‘Sellout Gala’ Slated for March 5th
C O M M E N T
[updated 17 Feb] The following “SAVE THE DATE GALA DINNER” announcement was recently posted on the Telfed Online website [update: page taken down; similar text is at the ILCCI site of the organizing “Israel-Lithuania”]:
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Citizenship, Double Games, Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Israel, Joseph Melamed, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, South Africa
Tagged Audronius Azubalis, Holocaust in Lithuania, Israel-Africa Chamber of Commerce, Israel-Lithuania Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Lithuania South Africa Israel, Lithuanian Embassy in Tel Aviv, Telfed Online
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The Lingering Legacy of Nazism
O P I N I O N
by Milan Chersonski
Milan Chersonski (Chersonskij), longtime editor (1999-2011) of Jerusalem of Lithuania, quadrilingual (English-Lithuanian-Russian-Yiddish) newspaper of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, was previously (1979-1999) director of the Yiddish Folk Theater of Lithuania, which in Soviet times was the USSR’s only Yiddish amateur theater company. The views he expresses in DefendingHistory.com are as always his own. Authorized translation from the Russian original by DefendingHistory.com.
The twentieth of January 2012 made it precisely seventy years from the day when a conference of ministries and agencies of Hitler’s Germany was held at the Marlier Villa by Lake Wannsee. It went down in history as the Wannsee Conference. Nazi officials in a business-like manner in ice blood, discussed the problems of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, the euphemism for genocide of the Jews in Europe.
Fulfillment of the Wannsee Conference decisions, which became directives, continued until the last days of the Nazi state. Not even the approach of the Red Army in the east or the successful landing of the anti-Hitler coalition in the west resulted in German leaders abandoning the project to annihilate the Jewish people. In the face of a string of crushing defeats, acute shortages of transport, ammunition, fuel and even food, the Nazis went on sending Jews to their death with a maniacal consistency.
But it would be a very serious mistake to think that the Wannsee Conference directives per se played the main role in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question here in Lithuania. In this part of the world the Nazis and their many accomplices had been quick to rob and massacre the majority of the Jewish population by December 1941. Before the Wannsee Conference.
Posted in 70 Years Declaration, Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Collaborators Glorified, History, Human Rights, Kaunas, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Milan Chersonski (1937-2021), Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius
Tagged 2008 Prague Declaration, Azubalis + Holocaust, Azubalis + Jews, Holocaust in Lithuania, The 70 Years Declaration, Wannsee Declaration
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A Hidden Monument in Vilnius — Hopelessly Invisible?
In response to several requests from the United States, DefendingHistory.com this week asked three colleagues who found themselves in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to try to see the “Flame of Hope” monument, by sculptor Leonardo Nierman, in memory of the victims of the Lithuanian Holocaust, located in the heart of the Old Town, in a yard that was in the Vilna Ghetto between September 1941 and the ghetto’s liquidation three years later.
Posted in Arts, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Exotic Jewish Tourism, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Shelly Rybak Pearson
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Lithuanian Parliamentarian Vytenis Andriukaitis, Signatory of 70 Years Declaration, Replies to Foreign Minister, Cites ‘Moustache’ Remark and the Implications of ‘Double Genocide’
O P I N I O N
by Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis
The following is an authorized translation from the Lithuanian text published on Delfi.lt on 9 February 2012. It is a reply to the foreign minister’s article published a week earlier (English translation here).
Honorable A. Ažubalis, Did You Pull Such an Understanding of History out of Thin Air?
by Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lithuanian Parliament
Honorable minister, looking at the headline of your public statement, I hoped at least that you would apologize for the position expressed earlier that “it is impossible to find any difference between Hitler and Stalin except in their moustaches (Hitler’s was smaller).” I agree with the position expressed by Dennis MacShane, member of the British House of Commons, that such jokes by foreign minister Audronius Ažubalis are inappropriate in discussing the mass murder of six million Jews.
SEE ALSO:
ANDRIUKAITIS SECTION
In your public statement, you again place two signed declarations in opposition to one another. One of them — the “only true one” — the “Declaration on European Conscience and Communism” signed in Prague in 2008, maintains that the precondition for a unified Europe is a unified view of history and the ability to condemn the last century’s crimes against humanity. The second, the Seventy Years Declaration — the declaration referred to as if it were a crime and condemned by you —was adopted marking the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee conference, a declaration which rejects attempts to trivialize the atrocities of the Jewish genocide.
Posted in 70 Years Declaration, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Free Speech & Democracy, History, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United Kingdom, Vytenis Andriukaitis
Tagged Audronius Azubalis + Holocaust, Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, The 70 Years Declaration, Vytenis Andriukaitis
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German Politicians Repudiate EU’s Rep in Afghanistan, who Calls Hitler’s Rule ‘Respite from Communism’
by Frank Brendle (Berlin)
The German Government has repudiated the trivialization of Nazi regime by the ambassador of the European Union in Afghanistan, Vygaudas Ušackas, a former foreign minister of Lithuania. In a 6 December Wall Street Journal article, Ušackas called Nazi rule in Lithuania “a few years’ respite from the Communists.” An apology was called for by Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office, and a debate ensued.
Posted in EU, Frank Brendle, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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The Lingering Legacy of Nazism
М Н Е Н И Е
Милан Херсонский
У НАЦИЗМА НЕ ДОЛЖНО БЫТЬ БУДУЩЕГО
20 января нынешнего 2012-го года исполнилось 70 лет с того дня, когда в 1942-м году на вилле Марлир близ озера Ванзее состоялась конференция представителей министерств и ветвей власти гитлеровской Германии, которая вошла в мировую историю по названию озера – Ванзейская конференция. Это было совещание нацистских чиновников, которые деловито и хладнокровно обсуждали вопросы реализации «окончательного решения еврейского вопроса», то есть полного истребления евреев в Европе.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Human Rights, In Russian, Lithuania, Milan Chersonski (1937-2021), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
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